being here up to our necks in history has been a real hoot: buildings older than our time keeping, who built what, where and when. who's the dude on that old nag, etc. the bastard of black prince, well, he came along 700 yrs ago, and the cathar wars.... so long ago....

but then there is a silence when one gets closer to home in the time line. odd.

or is it?

black prince's temper tantrum in the 1300s would by now have been settled, but what if it happened 70 yrs ago?

now THIS explains a LOT!

it explains why people don't got all animated about recent history and why lalonde will not speak to masson, but all are perfectly happy to chat with the youngs and the hares. not having realised it, but the villagers had quietly checked that these outsiders didn't bring their family feuds or Nazi sympathies with them.

a few miles south there is a village we checked out, longue... something. when we drove up, there were a few rubbish fires going, but - again - only a few stray cats visible. the village is ancient, before the horse and buggy era. the approach looked over its location up on a long, lean hill, from beyond a barren valley and past yet another grey, sullen cemetery.

we walked around, said we did not like the creepy feel of it. never went back.

today we found out just outside that village the Nazis had rounded up all the area's resistance fighters, young and old, herded them into a field. they shot them and just left them there.

closer to home:

In a report addressed to the Ministry of the Interior at the end of February 1939, the Prefect of Aude specified that in less than three weeks a true city had been built at BRAM, with electricity, drinking water, drain network for dirty water, highways department, postal service, hospital, mortuary, cemetery!

This camp had been built on a vast area of 12 hectares located in the MONTREAL district. It comprised 165 wooden huts and housed between 10,000 and 15,000 internees, mainly civilians and old people.

The camp at BRAM, which had begun to fall into disrepair, was temporarily closed down in October 1940.

that's 5 miles from here and they'd syphoned victims even from spain to cram in there.